Gender equality and discrimination in IT is a hot topic. More and more women are (rightfully) opening their mouth and point out problem areas. There are just some men who just don’t get it, those insensitive idiots, they are the reason IT is such a toxic harsh environment for women.

So I thought…

This is a story about when I realized I am (unintentionally) one of those idiots.

Joy of Coding

This friday I spoke at Joy of Coding in Rotterdam. An awesome conference and a real example for other conferences regarding gender equality. The main organizer is female (Hi Felienne!), she’s the face of the conference, presented the opening and announced the speakers on the main stage. They have a very good rule of conduct: Don’t make any assumptions. Also the line-up of speakers was almost 50/50 male and female.

And of all the conferences: This is the conference I made my mistake.

Hilary Parker

The last speaker at the conference was Hilary Parker. She’s a Data Scientist at Stitch Fix and talked about how programming in data science is maturing. No longer are the scientists tweaking Excel sheets, they’ve started to use tools and languages (like R) to do all the analysis.

I loved the presentation and I also love the fact more and more women are taking the step and talking on stage at conferences. We should totally cherish them! There were however two small things that I noticed though, first: on two occasions her screen went ‘asleep’ and the had to dash to her laptop and wiggle the cursor. The other thing was, Hilary talks with a very obvious ‘Silicon Valley’-accent. She has the habbit of putting ‘like’ multiple times in every sentence as a filler word.

It sounded like this:

“So like, when you like load all the data files, and like you run a tool like R, you like immediately … etc”. This got a little annoying once I noticed it. It kind of takes the focus away from the content.

Twitter

After the conference I didn’t have time to talk to Hilary in person. But I wanted to help her, I want to see more female speakers at conferences. So I went on Twitter, send her a DM (direct message) and gave her some unsolicited feedback in private.

What I said came down to: Have you considered installing ‘caffeine’? It is the perfect tool for public speakers to stop the screensaver from kicking in on OS/X. Also, I’ve noticed you are using the word ‘like’ a lot, up to the point it becomes a distraction. I think you could become an even awesomer speaker if you lessen the usage of the word ‘like’.

Unsolicited criticism

It turns out that unsolicited feedback almost exclusively happens with female speakers. Reading that article I realized that I never have this. People do sometimes come up to me after giving a talk, but only to say ‘nice talk’ or something similar.

This is the moment I realized I’m biased too. I never thought about this being a problem, but I can understand this can be extremely annoying as a female speaker. It was obviously not my intention to be a jerk giving unsolicited advice…

So why did you do it?

So what is the reason I made this mistake? I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days now. In Lara’s article she mentions some possible reasons it happens, but I have some additional ones:

Cherish female speakers

If you’re reading this you might think I’m just one of those insensitive men at conferences, but trust me, I’m trying not to be! The last couple of years I’ve been actively involved in changing our community to be a better place for everyone. I’ve helped organize and volunteer at various Devoxx4Kids events. I’ve been in CFP committees and have fought for more female speakers there….

One of the reasons I gave my feedback was because I want to see more female speakers. If a men fails, there are dozens of other men waiting to replace him. I thought that with my advice Hilary could become an even better public speaker, increasing her chance to speak at events and being an example to more women.

This statement is also gender discrimination, but in a positive way. From my experience women are more affable. They are friendlier, easier to approach and to talk to. Male speakers can have a ‘macho’ attitude, I don’t want to go up to them and give them feedback.

This might also be a big part of why female speakers receive unsolicited feedback and male speakers don’t.

Lessons learned

For me this experience was a real eye-openener, if you’ve made it this far and haven’t read Lara’s post yet, please do!

She writes:

Ask yourself some questions. When’s the right time? Is it constructive? What’s moving you to give feedback to them right now? And is it possible that your brain was itched by them not in a bad way, but in a potentially eye-opening way for you? It may reveal some unconscious biases in yourself that would be worthwhile for you to explore

It is very easy to fall into the gender trap. In my case it was a completely honest mistake, I wanted to help. But Hilary did nothing wrong, she talked the way she always does, with a ‘Valley’ accent… so what? Why was this the time I had to give some feedback?

I never thought that unsolicited feedback would be a problem female speakers have to deal with. I’d like to apologize and thank Hilary, she opened my eyes to this problem and allowed me mention her in this blogpost.

So next time you feel the urge to give some unsolicited feedback, stop and think about it…

Most conferences I get to visit are about Java. Java frameworks, techniques, other JVM languages, all of them have pretty much the same focus. However: there is one conference on my agenda that is… different (in a good way!). Joy of Coding is all about (you’ve guessed it) the joy we experience while coding. The topics are very broad, some talks are technical, others are not.

Talking about game theory

At this edition of the Rotterdam-based conference I was invited to talk about game theory and game algorithms, and I explained this by going from a simple game, to noughts and crosses, to chess and finally to Go. From minimax to alpha-beta pruning to neural networks. It is the same talk as I did last week at Devoxx UK, but now I had much more time, 30 minutes. This allowed me to go deeper into the algorithms and for example explain the free optimization you get with alpha-beta pruning.

The absolute best thing about Joy of Coding?
The logo/mascot! Just look at this extremely happy cute octopus:

Last week I went to London with my colleague Bert Jan Schrijver for the Devoxx UK 2016 conference. The UK-member of the international Devoxx conference family is smaller than its siblings. The event was three days, with the first two having talks and the last day was filled with hands-on-labs. During the first two days there were four parallel tracks giving the almost 1000 visitors enough content to pick from.

The quality of the speakers is very high in London. There are usually a lot of international speakers, probably due to the Devoxx-branding. But also the LJC (London Java Community) has done a lot to encourage their members to do public speaking, it shows!

Day 1

Devoxx UK started with one large keynote. James Veitch (stand-up comedian/nerd) entertained us with his experiences with so called ‘nigerian’ spammers. If you’ve never seen a presentation by him, check out his TED Talk for example right now! He’s amazing.

After the entertaining kick-off Mark Hazell (organizer) took the stage. And during his talk the next Devoxx-sibling was announced: Devoxx US. For the first time Devoxx is going to cross the Atlantic ocean. It will take place 21 to 23 March 2017 (during the Java 9 release?) in San José.

This news was followed by two technical keynotes. The first one was by Hadi Hariri (about the ‘free lunch’ in open source software) anf the second talk was by Mazz Mosley (about her Agile experiences). After this the four parallel tracks started. My colleague Bert Jan immediately took the stage with his talk on microservices in Vert.x.

The first conference day ended with the Ignite sessions (5 minute talks, 20 slides, auto-forwarding slides, fun topics), this is where I talked about the coming of Skynet (from the Terminator movies) and the fact that Skynet will run on the JVM.

The second day of the conference has again four rooms with parallel sessions. And during lunch I had my main talk, a 15 minute quickie about game theory, algorithms and the breakthroughs of Google/DeepMinds AlphaGo. The talk takes you from the most simple game you can imagine to Noughts and Crosses, to Chess and finally to Go. It talks about the algorithms you can use to make a computer play these games and why all those techniques don’t work with Go.

Day 2

The second day ended with the usual Community Keynote. During this keynote some crazy French guy warned us for Brexit, they talked about the problems with Java EE and they did three short interviews, one of them was with me! Martijn and Antonio asked me some questions about Joggling (which I’d done an Ignite talk before) and filming at Devoxx. The most scary part was then Antonio challenged me to juggle three glasses… which I did: (skip to 16:79)

We ended the day like real Londoners do: in the pub. After the last talk we went to ‘DevRoxx’, a party sponsored by Tomitribe, Lightbend, Couchbase and Atlassian.

Impression video

I’m also the ‘official’ Devoxx UK camera man/editor and I’ve created the following movie:

Yesterday, on the vJUG mailing list, Gilberto Santos asked the following question:

I’m working as Software Engineer and as intend to grow up to architect position, now on I was wondering how to best way to get there , should be :

Java certifications

Masters

Both ?

I replied to him over the email, but it might be something more developers are struggling with, time for a blog post!

Architects should code

There are two types of software architect:

The one that draws Visio® diagrams

The one that develops/codes

The first type of architect likes to talk, have meetings, draw diagrams and give orders. This, to me, is not good.

Architects should write code, they should be part of a team. In fact, everybody that writes code is effectively an architect and should have basic knowledge about architecture principles. For example every programmer should know about the SOLID principles.

Mistakes

The best advice I can give a developer that wants to grow into a senior/architect position is:

Make mistakes, lots of them.

If you want to become a better architect the most important skill to master is the art of making mistakes, noticing them, and not repeating them in the future. Most ‘enterprise’ architects I’ve worked with set up a project and leave before the thing they had designed starts to rot, smell and fall apart. They never experience the flipside of what they set up, you can make everything look good on paper.

As a programmer and architect you need to experience this ‘project rot’. To learn you need to feel the mistakes that are in every system. Once you start seeing problems, admit the things you’ve made aren’t perfect, and start changing them. Try to fix the mistakes.

Matt Damon would say: “I’m going to have to refactor the shit out of this.”

This experience is what makes you a real architect. The best architects I’ve worked with knew instantly what needed to change and which solutions would work better than others. They develop an instinct for this. In Dutch we have a saying ‘they know where the shoe pinches’. Which means: just by looking at it they have a ‘feel’ for what hurts and will cause problems (in the future).

However….

This experience/instinct is what makes you a good architect and a good programmer. But sadly this doesn’t directly get you a better job or position within a company. Managers, recruiters and HR can’t easily test for this instinct. Sadly: the thing they look at most of the time is certifications.

For example, I’ve mentioned the SOLID principles, and they are very important. It takes a maximum of 5 minutes to learn the acronym and use it in job interviews or get a certification. To really understand it though you need to experience SOLID. You need to encounter situations where huge classes have a lot of responsibilities. This is the problem with most certifications: they encourage you to memorize rules and principles, not to understand them. I’d rather have someone in my team that naturely breaks up code into clean interfaces than someone who memorized that the ‘I’ in SOLID stands for the ‘Interface segregation principle’.

Once you developed this ‘architect instinct’, people will notice it. Colleagues will remember and this will help you get better jobs and positions in the future. You’ll need to prove yourself and grow your network. Try to get recommendations from people you’ve worked with and you will become a real senior programmer and architect.

I’ve been a programmer now for 20+ years, but what is the best piece of code I’ve written in all these years?

The first thing that popped in my mind was this. It is a piece of code that can very quickly, in near linear time, generate de Bruijn sequences. I ‘invented’ it after reading a scientific paper that described how to quickly generate ‘Lyndon words’. I knew with Lyndon words you could easily generate the de Bruijn sequences. So I implemented it and adopted it for de Bruijn. Read more about this here.

Why is this my favourite piece of code? Well, it is small, compact and does something impressive. I couldn’t find a lot of implementations that had the fast runtime my code had. And it wasn’t trivial to implement, I had to do quite a lot of research and it felt like I myself did a little inventing. I probably wasn’t the first to write the algorithm though, but it felt like that for a while.

But is it…?

As a programmer I write code every day. And what I do even more is read code. If I have to guess, for each line I write I’ve read about ten times more. And after more than two decades of programming, I’ve seen my share of source code. This taught me something important. Is the piece of code I mentioned the best code I’ve written? I don’t think so.

What I thought the best code should have:

Looks smart

Amazes people

Jumps out

‘I could have never created that!’

It is magical!

The code I picked sure had some of these properties. But is it really the prettiest code I’ve written? No..

When you are working in a large codebase the best (and prettiest) code has the following properties:

Doesn’t stand out

Looks trivial

You don’t notice it’s there

You hardly ever need to change it

‘Gah, anyone could have written this’

The best code is code you don’t notice, code that doesn’t stand out, code that looks like anyone could have written it. It doesn’t contain smart things, it looks mundane. This is something we should always strive for… simple code.

So what is the best piece of code I’ve ever written? It is the code that will never be git-blamed, nobody will ask questions about it and nobody will even notice it exists.

Over the last decade we’ve had a lot of problems with authentication. For example, we’ve stored plain text passwords in the database. We’ve learned from this and nobody is doing this anymore right? If you are, please deposit your programming-license in the nearest trash can.

Latest challenge: Biometrics

It is time to talk about the latest problem in IT: biometric data.

Some websites are using biometrics, such as your fingerprint, as your password. This sounds great, very hard to fake, unique to you. But there is a problem… what happens when there is a data leak?

If you store passwords in the database (hashed or not), and they get leaked, it is bad. You need to tell all the users to change their passwords immediately. But what happens when you store biometric data and it gets leaked?

The only way to change your fingerprint is this:

Rather painful… and even worse, all devices and websites that use your fingerprint have the same password.

We don’t want to share passwords on multiple websites/devices!

Not a password

There is no real solution, as long as you ensist of using biometric data as a password. Even if you use a nice salted hash, it will eventually be leaked, with big consequences.

A better way to use biometrics in authentication is to treat it as a username. It is a great match, it identifies you. It is not your secret password, it is your username. That means you still need to provide a password, but having the added biometric username does increase security a lot. Of course if there is a database leak, your fingerprint can still be stolen, but that is the entire point. If you touch a glass door you’re also leaving your fingerprint. Using fingerprints as password is like dropping pieces of paper with your secret password all over the place.

Fingerprints (and other biometrics) are not secure, you can never change them once compromised, not suited as passwords. If you really want to use it, use them as usernames.

On the OpenJDK core mailinglist (and Twitter) there is a discussion about Java’s Optional.
Before diving into that discussion, lets take a look at what Optional does and how you can use it.

Checking for null

What do you do when your code calls an external service or god forbid a microservice, and the result isn’t always available?

Most of the time the protocol you are using facilitates in the optional part, for example in REST you’ll get a 404 instead of JSON. Getting this 404 forces you to think about this scenario and do something when this happens.

But what do you do when you’re calling a framework (on the boundary of your code) and the value isn’t always known?

You either get the value or the result is a dreaded null. This causes a lot of null checks, or bugs where the code just crashes with a NullPointerException.

Example (old skool, Java 7):

Orderorder=Database.readOrder();//can be nullif(order!=null){ProcessResultresult=OrderEngine.process(order);if(result!=null&&result.succeeded()){Database.storeResult(result);}}

This code is not very pleasant to read. But we Java programmers didn’t have or need anything better… until we started to adopt a more functional style of programming.

java.util.Optional

What happens when you are processing a stream and some values are null? You don’t want null checks inside a stream! This is where Java 8’s Optional comes in. If you’re not (yet!?) using Java 8, there are other implementations as well. For example Google Guava has an Optional as well.

Optional is a class that ‘might’ have a given value in it, or not, it is optional. So how exactly is this helpful? Instead of checking for null this wrapper class can handle some situations for you.

Even if the Optional is empty in either reading the order or processing the order… nothing breaks. No NullPointerException, nothing, just no executed lambda storing the result in the end. We’ve eliminated the need for a null check.

As you can see Optional can really clean up your code. You don’t need to worry about null checks anymore.

So what is the problem with Optional.get()?

Optional.get() deprecation discussion

Pretty much out of the blue on the OpenJDK mailinglist an email arrived with a webrev (similar to a patch file) that contained the deprecation of Optional.get().

The get() method is too easy to find, and the name isn’t quite what you’d expect, and the webrev author claims there are a lot of cases online where people made the same mistakes.

Many programmers, when they first encounter Optional, don’t know what to do. They look in their IDE and the first thing that pops up is get().

It is just an easy method to call:

Orderorder=Database.readOrder().get();

This works fine! Until there is a situation where the value is not available to the Optional. In that case it will throw an NoSuchElementException. How can we solve this? Well, we could do the following:

This is the ‘safe’ way, but it could just as well have been a null check now. There is likely a much cleaner way to process your Optional.

If you want to do something with the result, use filter, map, ifPresent (and many others).

If you need to return something, either return an Optional yourself, or get a default value by calling orElse, orElseGet or orElseThrow.

This is all you need, why have a get-method?

The proposal on the mailinglist is to deprecate the get() method and rename it to getWhenPresent(). This name change should warn people that it might not be present and they should check isPresent before calling get().

Instead of embracing this change some people on the mailinglist argue against deprecation, some of their reasons:

Renaming will break a LOT of code, well, not really break the code, it will cause deprecation warnings

getWhenPresent() instead of get() just adds noise to the code, it doesn’t solve anything

People should just read the JavaDoc, it clearly states what get() does and throws

Guava’s Optional also has the same get() method, they’ve never heard about the problem

The most honest and one of the more powerful replies in the discussion was from Brian Goetz himself:

As the person who chose the original (terrible) name, let me weigh in…

……

I’d like to see it fixed, and the sooner the better.

He is clearly in favor of deprecation… what is your opinion? Let me know in the comments!

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the state of Java EE and Oracle’s stewardship. There seems to be happening a lot. There is the fact that a lot of evangelist are leaving Oracle. There have been (Twitter) ‘fights’ between developers from Pivotal and Reza Rahman. And there are the Java EE Guardians, a group formed by Reza after he left Oracle.

Martijn said that while he recognizes Oracle’s absolute right to pursue a product strategy and allocate resources in ways that meet their business interests, the LJC is concerned that the lack of progress and the absence of any explanation from Oracle is doing significant harm to the Java community and ecosystem.

He explained that “splinter groups” are discussing taking over both the code work and thought leadership of Java EE, and that many companies are building proprietary frameworks such as microservices stacks, leading to even more fragmentation.

There are splinter groups forming, companies are building frameworks and stacks without following Java EE or contributing to future Java EE specs. People in the blogosphere/tweetosphere are complaining and worrying about it… but is it really a problem?

In my personal opinion: No.

There have always been companies experimenting, pioneering new technologies, without following Java EE specifications. This is for example how the Spring Framework got as big as it did. Remember however: Spring really shaped the future of Java EE, without it we might still be coding EntityBeans.

I think it might not even be a bad thing for Java EE to take a little break. There is a lot of unproven technology happening at the moment, for example there are the reactive frameworks and everything related to microservices. The landscape is changing quickly right now.

The worst thing that Java EE can do is to come up with their own new standards for these technologies while we, as developers, haven’t really worked out the quirks yet. Historically the best Java EE specs (IMHO) are the ones that came late to the party. But those are built on years of experimentation and crystallization. Those specs looked at everything the market had to offer, brought the relevant groups together and made it work.

So there is nothing wrong?

There is one big danger to Java EE right now. It is the fact people are complaining. If we don’t stop this, it might all become a selffulfilling prophecy.

Instead of worrying about Java EE, lets build tools and frameworks that are worth becoming an official spec. For example, look at the work Stephen Colebourne did with Joda Time. He was fed up with the horrible java.util.Date and decided to make something better. After years of programming and growing a huge fanbase it was finally turned into an excellent specification (JSR-310).

If you look at it, the most important thing Java EE might have done for us is bringing the relevant groups together, share ideas and distill the best practices (and writing those down as specifications). It is exactly the opposite of what is happening right now. I don’t mind splinter groups forming, if they get the right people together and work together towards forming solid specifications and implementations, why not?

I’m pretty sure Oracle (with Java EE) will take a look at the proposals and adopt them.

The most important thing is that we keep working together!

Update:
Some people have warned me that I’m being too optimistic. But time will tell, maybe Oracle will kill off Java EE, maybe they won’t. Maybe everything will take a turn for the worse, maybe it won’t.

For now I’ll just do what the Dalai Lama suggests: Choose to be optimistic, it feels better.

The more I’ve been thinking about var/val it seems that my biggest mental hurdle is the Java 7 diamond operator. The diamond operator is good, it eliminates typing, and I like it… but I have the feeling it could be so much better!

Instead of (or in addition to) adding var and val I’d love to see a solution where we could ‘flip’ the side of the diamond operator.

The thing is: There is much more to win on the LHS with the diamond operator than we currently have with the RHS diamond. In most cases you’re going to call code that has already defined the typing, in all those cases you can skip it LHS.

If it is possible to add var and infer everything, it should also be technically possible to have a flipped side diamond operator right? Or am I missing something?

Our application was already using JavaMail (javax.mail.*) as a way to inform our users. But for logging purposes we wanted to store all the emails we send in our database (and make them downloadable using our GUI).

It turns out this is pretty easy to do!

Let’s start with some very basic email code we already had in place:

// Some method to construct a MimeMessage:Messagemessage=createMailMessage(input);Transport.send(message);

What we need to do now is to ‘render’ the entire email in a binary format, including all the possible attachements, multipart things, from and to headers etc.

It turns out there is a convinient method for doing just that: message.writeTo(OutputStream)

Messagemessage=createMailMessage(input);// some method to construct a MimeMessage// Retrieve the entire message as byte[]:ByteArrayOutputStreamout=newByteArrayOutputStream();message.writeTo(out);byte[]contents=out.toByteArray();// Next we store the byte[] in our database (JPA) entity:ArchivedMailarchivedMail=newArchivedMail(sender,contents,LocalDateTime.now());mailArchive.store(archivedMail);Transport.send(message);

Our own little POJO entity (ArchivedMail) is stored in the database with some additional information that allows us to search the messages. The final step is to make a download link and present the email in a readable format to the users.

We’re using Wicket and thus the following example is Wicket code, but you could just as easily create a Servlet to return the data:

// Add the Wicket link-component to our page:add(newLink<ArchivedMail>("wicketLinkId",Model.of(somemail)){@OverridepublicvoidonClick(){IResourceStreamresourceStream=newAbstractResourceStreamWriter(){@Overridepublicvoidwrite(OutputStreamoutput)throwsIOException{// When clicked output a stream which contains the raw byte[]:output.write(getModelObject().getBytes());}@OverridepublicStringgetContentType(){// Add the content type for an EML file:return"message/rfc822";}};// Schedule the handler to return our resource stream (with a fancy name):getRequestCycle().scheduleRequestHandlerAfterCurrent(newResourceStreamRequestHandler(resourceStream).setFileName("mail.eml"));}});

Conclusion

Using JavaMail (javax.mail) it is very easy to get the ‘raw’ contents of an email when sending it.

This can be stored and downloaded in EML-format. It contains everything you need, mime, multipart, attachements and all the from/to headers.

Personally I’m not convinced this is a good idea for Java, but OTOH some of my colleagues and co-workers are very happy with the proposal.

Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of this proposal.

Pro: Less typing!

There is one obvious pro: Less typing.

‘var’ is just three characters, while most other local variables type names are much longer.

Instead of typing int, List, Person or SpringObjectFactoryManagerTemplateProxyDelagate you just have var.

// Instead of:List<Integer>myList=someMethod();// You can now have:varmyList=someMethod();// We saved 10 keystrokes! (<- probably less if you know shortcuts in your IDE)

Con: Readability

The biggest advantage of Java over other languages is the readability. The language Java is a bit verbose, but this is actually a good thing when it comes to reading the code.

Code is read more than it is written

Consider the following:

varmyVariable=dependency.calculateSomething();

What is the type of myVariable? When you are writing the code, you probably have a good idea why you called dependency and what you receive as return value.

But when you are reading the code, there is no way of knowing what myVariable is… you probably need your IDE to tell you, or look at the code of the dependency.

I personally think this is a con regarding the JEP. I’d rather have a verbose language where the IDE helps me with autocomplete and hide things… than having a language that needs an IDE to help me makes sense of the code.

Pro: Adding var doesn’t break anything

Some peope think (and argue) that adding this feature breaks backwards compatibility (because of the new keyword).

But this is not true!

When ‘var’ gets added it won’t be a keyword, it’ll be a ‘reserved type name’. This means that the following code for example would be working just fine:

// this compiles just fine:varvar="var";

Con: RHS versus LHS

This JEP focusses on the LHS (left-hand side) declaration by removing the need to specify a type. But recently, in Java 7, Java has introduced the diamond operator to eliminate verbosity in the RHS (right-hand side) declaration. With JEP 286, these two collide:

// Before Java 7 'diamond operator':List<Integer>numbers=newArrayList<Integer>();// With Java 7 'diamond operator', removing generic type on RHS:List<Integer>numbers=newArrayList<>();// With JEP 286, we need to add the generic type again at the RHS...varnumbers=newArrayList<Integer>();// Java, make up your mind!

Pro and con: Refactoring

Some people have argued that, after JEP 286, refactoring can become easier.
Look at the following, silly, example:

No matter what getSomeList() returns, it should work as long as it has the method isClosed. I think this is a weird example, because normally you would define an interface with isClosed and every class that implements this interface can be replaced/refactored as well.

There is a counter argument that can be made, refactoring can also be dangerous with JEP 286, look at this (crafted) example:

varanswer=SomeCode.generate();System.out.println(answer+42);

As long as the method generate returns a number the code works fine. But when someone changes the method to return an object or a String, it stops working without failing compilation. This argument however seems valid, but it would also break it you would have inlined the call to ‘System.out.println(SomeCode.generate() + 2);’.

This might make the problem a bit harder and more widespread. I believe there are more cases this can go wrong.

Try it out for yourself

The best way to get a feel for JEP 286 is just to try it out yourself!

There is a pre-compiled version of JDK-9 with JEP availabe for download at the website: iteratrlearning.

Conclusion

After looking at a lot of examples I’m still not convinced that JEP 286 is good nor bad. It can go either way.
There are some good pros but also quite a lot of cons.

When discussing this JEP with co-workers and colleagues I often get the following reply:

The arguments you’re using have been used when C# adopted var/val, stop complaining, they did it.

But did you know most coding guidelines for C# warn you for using ‘var’?

This weekend I continued working my project making a Java REPL adventure game that teaches the basics of programming (in Java). One main goal of starting this project was to get a better understanding of the JShell API, not just the tool. I’ve used the JDK 9 JShell command line tool before, and it worked great. But there is also a big API behind it you can programatically use.

What have we done here? Well first we’ve created an instance of the JShell. This is just like starting the command line tool. Now we can call the eval() function to evaluate Java code. As a result you receive so called SnippetEvents, these are classes containing the information about what happened. Let’s see what the code above returns:

There is quite some information in there, the event contains the actual ‘snippet’, the piece of code that was executed. Also there is a previous state, status and some other information. This is where the JShell API starts to feel weird to me. To get the Snippet from the SnippetEvent we can call the following method:

SnippetEventevent=events.get(0);// To get the information, we call snippet (not getSnippet()):Snippetsnippet=event.snippet();// Next we cast our snippet to the correct subclass:VarSnippetvSnippet=(VarSnippet)snippet;// Now we can retrieve information, for example the type we've created:System.out.println(vSnippet.typeName());//Output: int// We can also get the 'value' of the SnippetEvent:System.out.println(event.value());//Output: 10

There are a couple of points I don’t like about the current JShell API design here:

Why are the methods to get information called .snippet() and .typeName(), why not getSnippet() and getTypeName()?

Why is the result of vSnippet.typeName() a String?

Why is the result of event.value() a String? Didn’t we have an ‘int’?

First the question about the method names. In all of the JDK code they seem to be using the bean-specification, where you have getMethods() for getting and setMethod(…) for setting. I’m not sure why this isn’t the case for the JShell API? Is this a new way Oracle is designing their API’s? Do other new JDK API’s have the same syntax?

Next is the question regarding the usage of Strings. Why is the value() a String when we’ve clearly made something an int? Even worse, let’s create something that is not a primitive:

It is even worse, the only result we get from event.value() is a String and it is clearly just the .toString() of the actual backing object. For this API I would love to see it returning the actual object instead. I understand the JShell tool uses String’s and communicates the toString(), but shouldn’t the API be more general? Or am I missing something here?

Anyway, this is exactly why more people should try these API’s and share the feedback! Mail your feedback and suggestions to the mailing list.

What do you think? Please leave a comment below, or… even better, share your thoughts on the mailing list

I’ve been a big fan of the Java JShell from the early beginning. I was even the first one on the mailing list besides the people from Oracle. I’m working on a weekend/side project involving JavaFX and JShell API now for a couple of days and something was bothering me.

The project I’m working on is targetted at teaching kids to learn Java Programming in a fun way. But automaticly generated variable names called $1, $2, $3 etc are not ‘fun’ enough! Luckily I found the following method in the API:

Much better! If you’re interested in the project I’m working on, teaching kids Java with the JShell API and JavaFX, keep an eye out. When I have something worth showing I’ll push it to GitHub so everyone can enjoy it!

About a year ago someone on my current project did an initial setup of Gatling. This is a performance/stress test tool written in Scala, it is easy to use but very powerful. The basic idea is that you write the test scenario’s in code, the same way as you would create integration/unit tests. The advantage is that the resulting tests are easy to expand, maintain and you’ve got everything under version control.

One very powerful feature Gatling has is the Recorder. It is an application you can launch and it acts like a proxy server. Being a proxy server it can record and log all the calls you do to an application. Without writing any code it can automatically create a stress test!

But in my case someone has already created a scenario for me.

Basic Example

As a programmer it can be a bit daunting when you encounter a ‘foreign language’, in this case Scala. Fear not though, it is very easy to read, extend and write Gatling tests. This is the scenario I started with today:

classOurSimulationextendsSimulation{// Define some basic HTTP protocol settings:
valbaseHttpProtocol=http.inferHtmlResources().acceptHeader("""*/*""").acceptEncodingHeader("""gzip,deflate""").acceptLanguageHeader("""nl-NL,nl;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4""").contentTypeHeader("""text/xml""").userAgentHeader("""Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.120 Safari/537.36""")// Define a variables that is inserted into the SOAP template:
valincrementalId=newAtomicInteger// Define the scenario, read from CSV file, add additional variable to the session and post to OurEndpoint:
valscn=scenario("Our scenario").feed(csv("data.csv").circular).exec(session=>session.set("idField",incrementalId.getAndIncrement)).exec(OurEndpoint.post("SoapMessageTemplate.txt"))}objectOurEndpoint{defpost(soapMessage:String)=exec(http("RequestName").post("""/ourapplication/webservices/OurSoapEndpoint""").body(ELFileBody(soapMessage)).check(status.is(200)))}classOurSimulationLocalextendsOurSimulation{// The instance we want to run, against localhost (we also have these for other servers)
valhttpProtocol=baseHttpProtocol.baseURL("http://localhost:1234")// Setup the test, ramp up 10 users over a period of 20 seconds
setUp(scn.inject(rampUsers(10)over(20seconds))).protocols(httpProtocol)}

The SoapMessageTemplate.txt is just a plain text file containing one SOAP call, instead of data it contains tags like: ${field1}. There is also data.csv which is a CSV file with the field names in the first row, comma separated values in the following rows. The tags in the SOAP call get replaced by the values from the selected CSV row.

There is probably nothing more I need to explain, the code reads like it should. The main startingpoint is OurSimulationLocal, this class sets up the Simulation (using setUp()). The Simulation is contructed in the OurSimulation class, for each call it takes the ‘next’ value from the CSV, adds one additional field and posts the message to OurEndpoint, finally it checks for a 200 reply.

Custom Feeder

Instead of having a big list of different options in a CSV file, my task for today was to make a custom Feeder. It is the class that provides data as input for the SOAP messages. We want to have some random data that still makes sense to the application, based on some averages.

It looked pretty hard to do, not having programmed a lot of Scala. In the end it was a breeze! The only thing that bugs me is that there are so many different ways to write your code in Scala. I’m not experienced enough yet to know if it ‘reads’ like proper Scala code, I don’t yet know what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ code looks like.

objectMyFeeder{valrandom=newRandom()defapply():Feeder[String]={Iterator.continually(Map(("name",Random.alphanumeric.take(5).mkString.toUpperCase),("country",(if(random.nextDouble()<=percentageBuitenlands)"B"else"NL")))}}classOurSimulationextendsSimulation{//... snip ....
// The same scenario, now using our own feeder:
valfeeder=MyFeeder()valscn=scenario("Our scenario").feed(feeder).exec(session=>session.set("idField",incrementalId.getAndIncrement)).exec(OurEndpoint.post("SoapMessageTemplate.txt"))}

Writing a custom feeder is pretty easy to do. The apply() function creates an instance of a Feeder[String] which in turn returns a Map containing [String, String] key value pairs. These are then used to fill the SOAP template!

Of course the real thing I build today is a bit larger and more complex, but the code is basically the same!

At the moment it is very hard for an online nerd on Twitter. Star Wars ep 7: The Force Awakens has been released into the wild and most of us haven’t seen it yet. But luckely there is a solution, I’ve created a handy bookmarklet.

A bookmarklet is a piece of Javascript code that you can add as a bookmark. When you are on a certain website (like Twitter) you can press the bookmarklet and the Javascript is executed. The bookmarklet code I’m using has been created using this great website: DeClutter Twitter and it removes most Star Wars related tweets from your timeline!

ForceFilter

Just drag this bookmarklet ForceFilter to the bookmark section of your browser. Next time you open Twitter, quickly press the bookmarklet before reading.